Notices by Soatok Dreamseeker (soatok@furry.engineer)

The society we live in doesn't reward ethical behavior or critical thinking skills. It abhors creativity and free thought. The loudest "free speech" evangelists are quick to cozy up to fascists. The "right to bear arms" folks form militias to enact tyranny on defenseless people. It demonizes anyone that doesn't fit the mold and accuses them of heinous acts, often without any evidence.

And some people think I'm supposed to give half a shit about being perceived as "one of the good ones".

Sorry if you followed me expecting only technical posts, and not my ceaseless furry nonsense or dhole appreciation.

You have my condholences.

Everybody shut up and look at this dhole

https://bsky.app/profile/dholeposting.bsky.social/post/3lryegqytn22p

If you don't know how awesome dholes are, allow me to introduce you to some Dhole Facts.

Dholes hunt by using high-pitch whistles to coordinate their strikes across long distances.

Dholes form conmunal packs of up to 40 members to cooperate together.

Dholes have been known to pee while doing a handstand.

I genuinely do not understand people who have deep fried opinions about Signal needing a goddamn phone number in 2025.

Many privacy nerds were outraged when you needed to give out a phone number to other people in order to talk with them. I was one of those nerds. They fixed that with the usernames rollout.

As a mobile phone app, Signal uses your phone number to bootstrap your enrollment into the protocol. This is literally the path of least resistance as an SMS replacement app, for most users.

If you want to know whether Signal can obtain enough metadata to target users that have enrolled, the answer is complicated.

The way profiles are encrypted, and how sealed sender works, makes any targeting seem infeasible. (Your profile key rotates, at mininum, when you block someone.)

Signal currently does not have IP addresses, etc. stored. If this changes in the future, it will not be retroactive. If you're worried about that, Molly boasts Tor support. Maybe that's fine. I haven't audited Molly, and won't.

The people who tut-tut over the phone number requirement never articulate anything resembling a coherent threat model.

They also are quick to recommend alternatives with inferior cryptography.

Some days I just want to grab them by the shoulders and scream "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU ARE HURTING PEOPLE" directly into their ears.

I mentioned the sextortion cult within the furry fandom (known as Furry Valley) before.

https://soatok.blog/2021/01/14/welcome-to-the-furry-fandom/

See also: https://dogpatch.press/2025/02/21/freedom-fandom-fight-abuse/#:~:text=New%20forms%20of%20organized%20abuse

What you may not know is that they constantly try to suck up new users through deception. To that end, they secretly run a lot of NSFW furry groups.

They're currently doing this on BlueSky. In response to news coverage of furries that helped identify animal abusers in the fandom, they created this sock-puppet to sponge off the search engine interest:

Show me something cute.

Especially if it's furry art, fursuits, or related cuteness.

(NSFW is fine.)

@sarahjamielewis Hey @evan any ideas?

Hot take: ISO standards do not meaningfully matter to me, because an extremely impoverished, unbanked person cannot freely access their contents from a smartphone or library computer.

Therefore, I go out of my way to avoid referring to them or relying on them in anyway.

This isn't a queer polyamorous relationship, it's a Directed Acyclic Graph.

...of who's fucking who. It's called the FAG DAG.

This Pride Month, remember that if you see civil disobedience from a queer person: No you didn't.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/1kw821x/kindness_can_be_shown_in_many_ways/muh6pfn/?context=2

I left this comment on a popular Reddit thread, but thought folks here might also find it relatable.

The first time I flew first class (which was due to the kindness of another technologist who wanted to help me land a job by flying me to DEFCON), the way the other passengers treated the flight attendants disgusted me so much that I felt guilty sharing space with them. I tried to be kind and respectful in spite of the jerks, but it never sat right with me.

A few months later, another friend pointed out to me, if I hadn't been there, they would have had to deal with yet another rude, dehumanizing customer. It helps a bit.

"It costs nothing to be kind" misses the point, I think.

"Being unkind makes everyone poorer" is closer to the truth.

@pft I'm sure they do, but it doesn't come up much in my specialization.

@GossiTheDog @SwiftOnSecurity do either of you know better?

Years of being around folks in open relationships has rendered me immune to like 99% of drama.

"What would you do if you had a boyfriend and caught him in bed with another man?" -> "idk, put on a pot of coffee?"

@mkj @AliCatAD I should add some JavaScript that includes that if the document.referrer includes ycombinator.com in the string

@phryk This is always the funniest and dumbest cycle:

1. I write something on my furry blog.
2. Someone else submits it to Hacker news.
3. Someone complains about the furry art on my furry blog.

Oops.

Hacker News and its vaunted "meritocracy", folks:

(Before anyone complains about the goatse with incorrect numbers of fingers: The other obvious parody of OpenAI's logo is a hate symbol and I didn't want to go with that.)